Interlude
by agrippinilla4
Summary: As the Tardis heads for Rome in AD 64, Ian, Barbara and newcomer Vicki remember their respective pasts.


In the hexagonal-shaped interior of the time and space machine, Tardis, the pale gold lighting illuminated the faces of its four occupants. The ship had just left the planet Dido, where Vicki, the youngest of the four, had accepted Dr Who's offer that she should join Ian, Barbara and himself on their travels. Though more than dubious at the sight of what she described as 'that old box', Vicki had, at Dr Who's urging, walked slowly through its doors into the impossibly sized room that contained, amongst other things, a six-sided control panel with a round, glowing column of glass in the centre, a deep wing armchair padded with faded cushions, a circular, three-seated Victorian sofa and a bust of Nero on a marble stand.

Dr Who looked up from the control board and smiled at her. 'Well, child, very soon now we shall be arriving somewhere new. How do you feel about that, hmm?'

Vicki's eyes shone with excitement at the prospect. 'Where? Where will it be, Doctor?'

Ian Chesterton, an attractive teacher from 1960's London, 28 years old, coughed, not necessarily on his cigarette, one of the few he had left. Dr Who looked at him sharply.

Barbara Wright, a private tutor from the same period and place, was only too well aware of the Doctor's inability to direct Tardis, and his resentment at any mention or implied criticism of the fact. As usual, she hurriedly attempted to smooth over the awkwardness. She looked at Vicki and assumed a teasing expression.

'Never you mind,' she told the girl. 'It's a surprise.'

Dr Who, spared the necessity of an explanation, contented himself with making an unnecessary adjustment to a dial.

Ian sighed. His life had been so uncomplicated — well, relatively uncomplicated - in those days when he had lived in digs in Paddington. Every weekday morning his landlady, Mrs Claypole, had limped upstairs to rat-a tat-tat on his bedroom door and shout, amidst the burst of coughing that was the legacy of her several decades on forty Park Drive a day, that his breakfast was ready. How long it seemed since he had tasted those delicious tomato sausages made by old Pickman, the octogenarian butcher whose poky little shop lay two streets away. The Doctor had tried to match the taste for him on a couple of occasions by experimenting with the food machine, but it hadn't been the same by a long chalk.

Barbara thought of her widowed mother, Joan. Was she still waiting, in November 1963, for Barbara to arrive with the fish and chips? Every fortnight, Barbara had stayed at her mother's house from Friday night until after Sunday dinner. She had always picked up a 'fish and six' for each of them on her way there, or at least since the chip shop, run by the slatternly Ada and two other equally unkempt hags, had branched out into fish, for they had formerly served only chips and fritters. Joan Wright's cantankerous old father-in-law, Grandfather Ernie, had always smacked his lips over Ada's fritters, sometimes even going so far as to wear his false teeth in order to tackle them to his satisfaction. One Friday night in the autumn of 1962, however, Grandfather Ernie had suddenly slumped back in his smelly old brown armchair, and his loose-fitting top row of teeth had fallen, somewhat grotesquely, half out of his mouth. 'Dead as a doornail,' Doctor Upjohn had confirmed, rather tactlessly, Barbara had thought, as she had turned her head away sharply to avoid a full blast of the doctor's revolting whisky breath. Doctor Upjohn had been oblivious, for something had caught his eye. 'Why, Ernie was only halfway through his third fritter. He'll be in quite a mood over that while he's waiting at the pearly gates.'

On that life-changing Friday a year or so later, Barbara had telephoned to her mother and explained that she would probably be late. It was becoming very foggy and she was going to drive her young pupil, Susan English, home. In fact, despite the girl's desperate protests, Barbara had seized upon this opportunity to find out where Susan, an unusual and somewhat evasive girl, lived with her old grandfather. Barbara's curiosity had been increasing over the last weeks, and now that her chance had come she had refused to be put off. How could Susan sometimes be so very clever and knowledgeable, down to the tiniest details, yet at other times make such extraordinary mistakes? Children years younger knew about the Spanish Armada, yet Susan had thought it was a castle! Then there was her elusive grandfather, who paid Barbara the ridiculously high salary of twenty pounds a week as if it were the going rate for freelance tutors. What was behind it all? Why were this intriguing pair, in certain respects, so out of touch?

If only she could have known, as she and Susan had set off, that this was merely the prelude to an adventure quite beyond any normal conception of the word, and that Barnes Common on a foggy November night was the last view of Earth in her own time that she might ever have.

The lorry had come off the road, the middle-aged soldier who had been driving it was dead, and she had driven into the side of the vehicle, fortunately at a reduced speed because of the fog. Susan had bumped her head, and Barbara's own face had been bleeding. She had encountered Ian Chesterton after staggering into the mist in search of help. He had been returning from an abortive job interview in Reigate, had become lost in the fog and had stopped his car. Together, they had made their way to Barbara's car and had found Susan gone. They had come across the police telephone box shortly afterwards, and had encountered the mysterious, somewhat forbidding old man with the flowing white hair and the long black cloak — Susan's grandfather, Dr Who.

With Susan, who had been inside Tardis attending to her thankfully superficial injury, Barbara and Ian had been transported by the Doctor, who had been furious about their discovery of his time and space machine, which was permanently stuck in the shape of a police box, to a distant planet named Skaro, in the next universe but one, a world all but destroyed by atomic warfare. The inhabitants had been a peace-loving, cultured people, the Thals, and their bitter enemies, the semi-robotic Daleks. Dr Who had attempted to take Barbara and Ian home, but it seemed that they were destined to return, if at all, by a decidedly meandering route. They had visited Cathay in the year 1289, in the company of Marco Polo, the Aztec Empire in 1430 and France under Robespierre, whose revolutionary zeal had prevented Madame Guillotine from going rusty. In the London of 2164 they had become involved in a second struggle against the Daleks, at the end of which Susan had found herself in love with a handsome, dark-haired young resistance fighter, David Cameron, with whom she had remained. Ian and Barbara had travelled on with a saddened and somewhat mellowed Doctor. Tardis had arrived on Venus, and then in ancient Egypt, in the mines of Alexandria, before materialising on the world called Dido, where they had met Vicki.

Vicki, content for the moment to wait for her 'surprise', sat down in Dr Who's comfortable armchair. She wondered, with some trepidation certainly, but mostly with excitement, for the trials and tribulations of her past had not succeeded in crushing the resilience of youth, what the future held for her now. Since there was no way of knowing that, her mind naturally turned once more to mulling over her life so far.

Her mother had died when she was born, the result of a botched Caesarean section — there had been an omission in the midwifery programme of a brand new computer surgeon, a reminder to the complacent that even 25th century medical technology could be reduced to the level of an inept quack by the vagaries of human error. Her father had sued, of course, but the case had been brushed aside. Her mother, in a small concession to the demands of vanity, had lied about her age on a related official form, and had thus provided a relieved opposition with a heaven-sent legal loophole.

Consigning Vicki to an elderly aunt, her father had spent ever-longer periods in his position as a crew member on space freighters. Vicki was educated by computer and spent the remainder of her time reading, since her aunt, though kindly, was not the chatty type. Quickly establishing a preference for Jane Austen, though there was also a lengthy fascination with Emily Bronte's Heathcliff and his rough but decidedly sexy persona, Vicki had quite fancied herself as Elizabeth Bennett, or perhaps the spirited Marianne Dashwood, though in the case of Marianne she felt that her own version could easily have tempted back the handsome Willoughby.

Her aunt died and Vicki had accompanied her father on a trip. The ship had promptly developed faults in both the primary and auxiliary drive systems and had crashed on the planet Dido, breaking in two in the process. By the time Dr Who, Ian and Barbara had arrived on the scene only Vicki and a paralysed crew member called Bennett (just like Elizabeth, she had thought, until his somewhat morose personality had impressed itself upon her and induced her to dismiss the connection) survived. She had lived in fear of the imposing Koquillion, a terrifying figure covered in spikes, and a supposed native of the planet, whose people, she understood from Bennett, had killed the other members of their crew, including Vicki's father, during a period when Vicki herself had been quite ill and confined to bed. Koquillion, it seemed, had decided to protect the pair of them, though why she had been unable to fathom, as a vicious streak was more than evident. It had not, however, taken the cannily perceptive Dr Who long to deduce that Koquillion was in fact Bennett in disguise. Bennett had killed the other crew in order to conceal an earlier murder he had committed on the ship. Vicki had not been aware of his crime, or he would undoubtedly have removed her too. Confronted by two of the actual Didonians — enigmatic humanoids - Bennett had fallen from a high rock ledge to his death.

So here she was now in the Tardis.

Dr Who looked across at her, beamed, then forgot himself and undermined Barbara's glossing over of his inability to direct the time and space machine by saying, in a manner that displayed his own intense excitement, 'We should be arriving soon. I wonder where, hmm?'


End file.
